Adolf Endler (10 September 1930 – 2 August 2009) was a lyricist, poet, essayist, and prose author. Endler was opposed to the socialist realist art of the German Democratic Republic. Endler was recognized in the contrarian literary scene of Prenzlauer Berg, in East Berlin. In 2005, he became a member of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung (German Academy for Language and Literature).
Endler was born in Düsseldorf in 1930. A communist in his youth, Endler moved to East Germany in 1955 and studied at the Johannes R. Becher Institute of Literature in Leipzig from 1955 to 1957. An acclaimed poet, his work was popular in both the East and the West. At the same time, he was shunned by party functionaries because of his opposition to socialist realism.
Although socialist realism had spread across most of Eastern European cultural life, artists such as Endler sought to undermine it. He defied cultural directives of the state and communicated secretly with his peers. Endler coined the term "Sächsische Dichterschule" () to describe German writers born in the 1930s who were influential in poetry, such as: Karl Mickel, Heinz Czechowski, Sarah Kirsch and Volker Braun. British poet Michael Hamburger applauded the group for their creativity in the hostile environment of East Germany at the time. Hamburger secretly recorded the correspondence between individual poets which "held the young writers together" in a state that was hostile to their work. Some of the correspondence was documented by Erich Fried (a colleague of Endler's) in his review of "in diesem besseren Land" (In this better land).
Endler continued to be a controversial figure in East Germany into the 1970s. In 1976 songwriter Wolf Biermann was deported from the GDR. Shortly after, Endler himself was expelled from the Writersâ Association of the GDR in 1979, after declaring his solidarity with his previously reprimanded colleague Stefan Heym. Throughout the 1980s, he contributed to various Berlin and Leipzig underground magazines.
In the 1990s, Adolf Endler became known to a wider public through a volume of memoirs entitled Tarzan am Prenzlauer Berg (Tarzan at Prenzlauer Berg). From 1991 to 1998, with Brigitte Schreier, he organized the "Orplid&Co." readings in Café Clara in Berlin-Mitte. Endler died in August 2009.
<blockquote>A lot of people connect liberalization with the fact that the GDR for international reason didn't want to have any trouble. The GDR wanted to be thought of in the international community as something very decent and without blemish. That was something we went along with. Our only means of power was to threaten to make an international fuss. If a book had been published in the west, and then the author had been sent to jail, there would have been a fuss. There must have been five hundred of us who had written letters or who had collected signatures. There weren't three hundred thousand people, but there were always ten or twenty thousand refractory people who as a rule wanted to stay in the GDR, but who, out of some sort of defiance or whatever, weren't ready to put up with it. They weren't the people who had left because they were fed up to the teeth." -March 15th, 1992.</blockquote>
âÂÂHe admired those who play with language like Kurt Schwitters and Alfred Jarry, astute minds like Karl Kraus and Georg Christoph Lichtenberg and great epic writers like François Rabelais and Hans Henny Jahnn. It was only after the political turnaround of 1989 that people noticed that he does not compare at all unfavorably with them â but not too late, thank goodness.âÂÂ